Helping a friend with my new skills

Our best couple friends are getting married in October.  The bride's mother lives in another state and the only  other bridesmaid that lives locally is in nursing school full time, working, and currently very pregnant.  So I have have got to play surrogate everything and actively help out with lots of the planning.  It's so much more fun doing that stuff when you're not paying for it!

I had already agreed to taking engagement photos for her to help her save some cash and give me valuable experience and hopefully portfolio material.  So when she was having a difficult time finding invitations which were affordable that she also liked, I thought my newly growing photoshop skills might come in handy.

One night while laying in bed unable to sleep, I played around with some papers and frames I already had saved on my laptop.  I came up with this:

A photo of them would go in the frame on one side of the invitation, and then the verbiage would be on the other.

Then, as I was browsing different printers online, trying to see about how much it would cost to print the amount she needed and if doing them custom would actually be saving her any money, I came across these Die cut cards

Eureka!  These are awesome!  I remembered seeing some Christmas cards made in this format through the holidays, but at the time I didn't know enough about photoshop to lay out a card template on my own.  I had mine printed on a site that offered free pre-made templates.  But these would make beautiful invites.  

So I had her send me some links to a few invites she really liked (but were out of her price range) and came up with this:

Which she liked.  But were were talking about some other things I had saved on my computer and I showed her my first version (the one I threw together with stuff I had on hand).  She really liked the worn damask background, but the colors were a little off and we definitely wanted to use the die cut template.

After looking for free damask textures or papers online, and not finding anything completely suitable, I layered together a paper and a pattern, then ran some vintage actions on it and added noise to get a damask that had the look and colors she wanted.

Voila!

I was thrilled with it.  She was very happy with it and actually said she liked it better than anything else she had seen.  I'm still going to tweak it a bit by letting her browse some free fonts online, decide the exact verbiage for the invite side, then possibly add a cute/romantic quote for the photo side.  And obviously, a photo once we get them taken.  But, I am really pleased with them already.  I think I might be doing more of these in the future.